Free Undead and Underwater by MaryJanice Davidson Page B

the tech cool.
    “The more I’ll eat, the stronger I’ll get. The stronger I’ll get, the more I’ll pull a Hailey smash all over this department, your car, your home. Even if you’ve backed it all up somewhere else, this is your baby. We all know it. It’s actual, physical tech you will never get back. Tech I’ll convert to energy and use to, I don’t know, have sex for a week without stopping, with Linus here. That’s what will happen to your Precious. I’ll use it to have sex. And you won’t have it anymore.”
    “ Tons of sex!” Linus added.
    “And that,” she added, watching all the color fall out of Edward’s face, “that’s just the first thing to pop into my head. I’ll spend days thinking about how to fuck you up. Weeks. Years. ”
    It broke him. Linus saw it at once. It wasn’t the threat. Not even the threat of more threats. It was her face and her tone. She had looked sorry; she had also sounded genuinely sad when she spoke of doing things she couldn’t take back. Like she knew what it was like. Like she had experience with being fucked with, and was sad because she knew the march of events was inevitable.
    It broke him, and he agreed to everything.

CHAPTER
    FOURTEEN
    “Toldja,” The Old Coot said, watching as the Savage police hauled a cuffed and raving Edward to a jail cell far, far away.
    “Inevitable,” Audrey the Receptionist agreed. “The second time he told me the only god I should pray to was the server god, I figured he was bound for, I dunno, prison, or the bottom of the Mississippi, or one of Hailey’s sensitivity training seminars. Some wretched fate that would make him pray for death. He must have done something more evil than usual to get you up in his face like that,” Audrey noted. “What, did he call you out about being It Girl?”
    For a second Hailey couldn’t breathe. She actually doubted her ears: Had Aud the Rec really said what she thought she had? She stole a glance at Linus, who looked remarkably serene.
    “That’s it, isn’t it?” The Old Coot asked, observing Hailey’s frozen expression. “What’d you do, threaten to eat his tech? If I was It Girl, that’s what I would have done. Actually, I would have trussed him with barbed wire until he looked like an insane hedgehog, then made him watch while I ate allllll his back-ups.”
    “How—How—I—How?”
    “Are you kidding?” The Old Coot looked at Audrey, who was slowly shaking her head. “Is she kidding?”
    “’Fraid not. That’s the extent of the cloud this woman walks around in.”
    Hailey knew she sounded idiotic but was unable to stop. “There’s not—I don’t understand—You couldn’t—”
    “Seriously with this?” Audrey the Receptionist asked, incredulous. “For God’s sake, you leap out two-story windows and are constantly seen eating things that would kill anybody else. There’s a bus crash or whatever, and suddenly you remember you have to race home and feed your nonexistent cat, and then while you’re feeding the cat we all know you don’t have, someone mysteriously saves the lives of a dozen first graders. Then you come back looking like you’ve been—I dunno—shoving buses off railroad tracks? Of course you’re It Girl! Or a super villain. But we thought you were in on it.”
    “In on what?” Linus asked. He figured he could get away with it, being new. And Hailey looked so shocked, he was worried she might pull a Linus and faint. Black out, rather. Fainting was for sissies. He took her hand and she clutched at him with panicky fingers.
    “Well. We don’t talk about it so much, but we all know you’re It Girl. We try to look out for you. And in return we figured you’ve been looking out for us, getting us all those awesome paid holidays, keeping the boss happy so she’s not here trying to get people to practice broomball with . . .” The Old Coot turned to Linus. “Basically Hailey here keeps the human in human resources . We thought you thought we